Spiritual wisdom traditions of East and West have distinct accents in their respective characterizations of what awaits the individual who is finally ready to break past the constraints of personal identity and a conventional life. Conventional refers to the system of assumptions, habits, values, and agreements that define the worldview and way of life for members of a society.
Invariably, conventional systems are theistic by design. Taller powers (parents and other adults) supervise, manage, and direct the experience of children, as higher powers (deities and other imaginary immortals) govern the grownups. The whole thing is designed around the central project of constructing personal identity and ensuring its compliance with convention.
Personal identities and their resident egos are not products of natural evolution but rather constructs of social engineering.
An individual must be domesticated and shaped to the conventional worldview and way of life. Their animal nature has to be trained, disciplined, and instructed away from its primal instincts and redirected along new (conventional) channels of moral obedience.
Gradually, if all goes according to plan these goads and brakes of morality will be internalized as the individual’s conscience (i.e., the inner parent and voice of god). Its promptings and judgments will henceforth serve to keep the individual in line with what society deems right behavior of a good person. For the righteous – defined as a right-behaving good person – await the rewards of social approval and honor in this life, everlasting beatitude and glory in the next.
And this is where they can stay, safe in the fold and looking forward to their time in greener pastures.
Conventional society works as long as everything goes according to plan. Raise up the children, facilitate their adoption (formal confession) as children of god, assign the roles and enforce the rules of god’s will as they work and raise up children of their own to add to the righteous fold.
Sure, you’ll have deviants and apostates along the way, but they can be dealt with by such moral mechanisms as shame, chastisement, excommunication, punishment and damnation.
For thousands of years it worked like this, until a certain kind of deviant started showing up more frequently across noncontiguous conventional societies. In both East and West of the early first millennium BCE these outliers began thinking and talking differently about personal identity, conventional life, human potential, and the nature of ultimate reality.
Personal identity consists basically of an actor (ego: “I”) wearing a mask (persona: “I am “) that identifies them to an audience of other actors (society). It’s important to underscore the point that this ego-and-mask (or suit) ensemble is not something an individual is born with. Indeed, its construction requires that a center be established apart from the body, upon which a self-conscious vantage can be gained.
Such a developmental achievement requires social scaffolding to motivate and support the individual’s ascending progress in personal power: beginning with impulse control and advancing through emotional stability, cognitive flexibility, performance integrity (staying true to character), and moral commitment to social values and expectations.
The goal for the individual, now having become somebody, is to fit in and do their part for the good of all – “all” referring more or less exclusively to the in-group of fellow actors.
To capture this idea of identity as social construction, the illustration above depicts a ladder upon which the ego is making its climb – or perhaps it has gotten stuck on one of the rungs mentioned in the previous paragraph. In that case, the individual may be hung up in the complications of dysfunctional power: low self-control, imbalanced affect, closed-minded conviction, role confusion, or a weak conscience.
Getting stuck on the ladder of personal identity is a main reason why societies collapse, divide, and disintegrate.
Individuals who lack ego strength combine their neurotic insecurities for an exponential effect that can amplify across society and cause its destruction. Before the city gates close and its streets go silent, however, individuals will fall into chronic episodes of anxiety and depression, meaninglessness and despair, until all hope is lost and the human spirit within them goes dark.
Let’s be clear: it is not inevitable that the construction of personal identity should get tangled up in the complications of dysfunctional power. It’s also possible – especially in conventional societies with theistic structures that are more enlightened, provident, liberal and nurturing – that this whole enterprise of becoming somebody in conventional society serves to prepare the individual for a breakthrough to the liberated life.
This is where those distinct accents of East and West come into the picture. From ego’s centered position on the ladder of personal identity, the individual can release and descend into the deeper registers of consciousness: down through the attachments of identity, past the mirrors of self-conscious reflection, dropping along the vital rhythms of the body and into the quiet clearing of mystical presence and inner peace we call soul.
This deeper oneness is nondual, as the Eastern traditions maintain, far below ego in the grounding mystery of Being where there is no this-and-that, but only This: the nameless, formless, boundless, ineffable Mystery.
From that same position on the ladder of identity an individual might otherwise choose to connect and ascend into the higher registers of consciousness: up through the attachments of identity, past the oppositional categories of self and other, insider and outsider, rising along the unifying currents of love and into the inclusive fellowship of communal life we call spirit.
This higher wholeness is transpersonal, as the Western traditions maintain, high above ego but also including our individual differences in mutual respect, open dialogue, and unconditional acceptance.
These nondual-mystical and transpersonal-communal pathways are the Yin and Yang of a post-theistic spirituality. It is our hope for becoming fully human and finally free.
Tracts of Revolution 